Generally, a silver halide color photosensitive material which has been exposed to light is processed by developing, bleach-fixing and rinsing steps or developing, bleaching, rinsing, fixing, rinsing and stabilizing steps but such method of processing has encountered the problem involved in the preservation of environments or water resources which has recently been deemed important. Therefore, there have been proposed various methods for reducing the amount of rinsing water which is used in large quantities. For example, the specification of German Patent No. 2,920,222 and a technical literature entitled "Water Flow Rate in Immersion-Washing of Motion Picture Film" (Journal, SMPTE. 64, pages 248-253, May (1955) by S. R. Goldwasser) are known as showing techniques for reducing the amount of rinsing water by reverse-flowing the water through a plurality of tanks. Further, there are described in the Japanese Laid-open Patent Publications Nos. 57-8543, 58-14834 and 58-134636 methods for processing a photosensitive material in a stabilized condition without substantially performing a rinsing step.
However, although all of the above prior art techniques have been proposed to control the environmental pollution by reducing the amount of supply of rinsing water, they are quite insufficient with respect to the time-lasting preservation of a photographic image and especially, they have the disadvantage of presenting a high degree of color fading due to light in a high-temperature and high-humidity atmosphere. Further, it has been found that the above problem is liable to take place depending on the variation of processing conditions (mixing conditions or temperature of the processing bath) due to the use of a stabilizing agent free of rinsing.
Further, the number of mini-labs has been increasing and those which have already been installed throughout the country count about 3,000 in number as of May, 1985. It is said that about one-third of them was installed in the past one year period. Certainly, an unprecedented mini-lab boom! Most of those mini-labs use a non-rinsing stabilizing solution because of the requirements of compactness, pipelessness and simplicity. However, it has been found that many of the mini-labs have disadvantages in that when a photosensitive material is processed by such mini-labs, the stabilizing solution is enriched to increase the salt density resulting in an increase in the accumulation of an irradiation-proof pigment or a sensitizing dye dissolving and flowing from the photosensitive material with stains generating on the material.
At the same time, with the recent mini-lab boom, each company in this field of industry has come to develop and sell a variety of kinds of automatic developing machines but the mixing systems for stabilizing solutions and capacities of such developing machines are versatile tending to produce too large differences in mixing capacity among them and it is the actual circumstances that there are some mini-labs which are extremely undesirable with respect to the prevention of stains generating on the photosensitive material. Above all, such stains are remarkable on the unexposed section of the photosensitive material and in the case of color paper, since the unexposed section is white, even a light stain makes itself a serious defect while in the case of a negative color film, the exposure-time of the printer is affected thereby so much as to produce a color unbalance.
Further, it has been found that in case a color image is stored, the generation of such stain deteriorates the durability of the color image especially in a high-temperature and high-humidity atmosphere.